“I’m not gonna hurt her.”

“I don’t know that.”

“You know me.”

“Do I?” She laughs. “You come in here, I offer you food and cut you a deal on that cleaver – I think it’s a Richter Brothers cleaver if you care – and, and, and most of the time we just shoot the shit like two friends catching up on the day’s… the day’s whatever. But I know who you work for. I’m not stupid. And now you’re asking me about my girl? My girl who belongs to a gang? I won’t. OK? I won’t.”

“Karyn, c’mon, this is important–”

“You need to go.”

He thinks for a half-a-second: I could make her talk.

That’s what he does. Makes people hurt. Sometimes so they spill.

He’s good at it.

It’s a horrible thought. And he can’t do that. Not to her.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

“Good.”

“Thanks for…” He doesn’t even have to say.

“Get out.”

10

Man will never colonize the Great Below. It is too wild. Too unreal. The chthonian labyrinth is a place of madness and I have seen it warp the mind of man the way a long damp warps a wooden beam. I myself have become twisted by the space but never enough to fool myself into thinking that we can or should stake a claim here. Yes, the Great Below has its villages and outposts – the marketplace of Yonder, the rat’s nest of addicts and madmen in the Freedom Tunnel, the temple of the People of the Turning Worm, the living graveyard of Daisypusher. And, of course, they have colonized us: the denizens of the Great Below have carved out territory in the Infinite Above – warehouses and nightclubs, restaurants and abandoned houses. The Chinatown block between Mott and Elizabeth is a known haven for starry-eyed monstrosities who care little for the Great Below and who hope to give it a go in the world above. Were you to ask me, I’d again reiterate that man will never properly colonize the Great Below. But give the monsters half a chance and they will most certainly colonize us.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

They’re gonna kill her.

That thought keeps running laps through his head. They’re gonna find her. They’re gonna kill her. Because of what she did. Or what they say she did.

Mookie needs to find her, but he’s going nowhere fast. Karyn wouldn’t give up her girl. He shoulda known. Shouldn’t have even asked her to do that, and now here he is, heading to deal with the Devil to see if he can’t get a lead on his babygirl.

Shit. Shit.

He comes up out of the subway on Canal Street. Heads into Chinatown. Three-thirty in the morning. The Blazes are no longer a warm fire but a cigarette burn at the edges of everything, sizzling and searing him with a nicotine char.

Which means he’s gotta get in quick, get out quick. Doesn’t want to go in blind. And he knows that dipping into the Cerulean again so fast before he’s had a chance to sleep could be trouble. (But here a little hungry monkey in the back of his brain screeches and hoots and rattles the bars of its cage, desperate to feed, feed, feed.)